August 31, 2012

Photoshop CS6 13.0.1 available; update on Retina plans

The Photoshop team has updated CS6 to version 13.0.1, addressing a number of functional, crashing, and performance problems discovered in the app. To get the update, choose Help->Updates within Photoshop. For more details on what’s been changed, check out this post.

Updating Photoshop to offer native support of Mac Retina displays is a big task & remains a work in progress. Maria Yap provides some info:

To enable HiDPI display support in Photoshop requires the replacement of 2500 icons and cursors and other engineering work which will be complete and ready for customers this fall.

We will continue to release security patches, bug fixes and support new hardware changes, like HiDPI display support, to all of our customers outside of our regular development cycles just as we have always done.

So, at risk of over-explaining: The arrival of the subscription-licensing option doesn’t take anything away from what’s always been available, and it doesn’t force you to subscribe just to get fixes & compatibility updates. Instead, it’s just a new option providing a benefit (periodic new features) that wasn’t available previously.

*Like Retina support, these updates provide the same features with new hardware.

New Illustrator features now available to Cloud subscribers

“When we launched Creative Cloud,” said my boss Jeff Veen, “we said that one of biggest benefits was early access to Adobe innovation. As soon as our engineering teams can finalize new features, like the ones we’re seeing for Illustrator today, we will release special Creative Cloud editions of our desktop software, only available to Adobe Creative Cloud members.”

New features in this Adobe Illustrator release:

Package Files – a long-requested feature that allows designers to automatically collect all the files used in an Illustrator project, including linked graphics and fonts, into a single folder helping make handoffs and sharing of projects more efficient and error-free.

Unembed Images – a new capability that enables production artists to quickly unembed images that have been embedded into an Illustrator file by other designers or customers, eliminating much wasted time in day-to-day production work.

Links Panel Enhancements – a new feature enhancement that allows users to access and track information on any artwork placed in an Illustrator file much quicker. What used to require multiple clicks to ensure all placed graphics meet necessary requirements for output is now surfaced up front.”

Important: Files remain fully compatible between copies of Illustrator CS6, whether those copies are acquired through subscription (and thus able to take this update) or through traditional licensing.

For more info on what these updates mean, please check out my recent post (which includes lots of back-and-forth in the comments).

Lightroom 4.2 release candidate adds camera support, fixes bugs

Lightroom 4.2 is now available as a Release Candidate on Adobe Labs. The “release candidate” label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers.

A 3D print of your head, delivered by flying drone

Before looking up to see a UAV, festival-goers will have previously visited ReAllocate’s ‘dome’ to complete the first part of the art experience. At the dome, visitors can interact with a photo booth fitted with Kinect cameras, where with 3D software, their photos will be turned into 3D models. Instead of waiting for the models, attendees can leave the dome with a GPS transponder, free to enjoy other aspects of the festival.

By the way, in case you’ve ever wondered what my Twitter avatar is (and, oddly, some have), it’s a pair of 3D prints of my head. #oddJobPerks

August 26, 2012

Animation backlash

I came to Adobe specifically to democratize animation, to tear down barriers that crippled Flash back then. There can be a fine line, though, between “democratizing” and “cheapening the coin,” as this funny, profane little piece from Harry Partridge illustrates:

August 20, 2012

Lightroom meetup this Thursday in SF

Check it:

Learn All About the New Map Module: Come join us at the Adobe San Francisco office and learn all about the new Map module in Lightroom 4. We’ll discuss all of the features of the module, all the ways in which you can plot your photos on a map, and why you might want to. And as usual, we’ll have pizza and raffle off some prizes. Hope to see you there!

Illustrator HTML5 Canvas Exporter-In Updated for CS6

Developer Mike Swanson has rewritten his plug-in (used to turn Illustrator artwork into HTML-native Canvas code) to be 64-bit native & thus run inside Illustrator CS6. Download it here, or for a refresher on what it does, check out the earlier introductory video.

Dan Marcolina, author of the critically acclaimed book/ iPad series “iPhone Obsessed” will be closing our show on Friday night August 24 appearing at the Coloft, 7-10pm 920 Santa Monica Boulevard Santa Monica, CA 90401. He will be showing you how the combination of picture choice and multiple app processing can turn a simple snapshot into a statement.

Using Kinect to turn objects into puppets

Fascinating!

KinÊtre is a research project from Microsoft Research Cambridge that allows novice users to scan physical objects and bring them to life in seconds by using their own bodies to animate them. This system has a multitude of potential uses for interactive storytelling, physical gaming, or more immersive communications.

“When we started this,” says creator Jiawen Chen, “we were thinking of using it as a more effective way of doing set dressing and prop placement in movies for a preview. Studios have large collections of shapes, and it’s pretty tedious to move them into place exactly. We wanted to be able to quickly walk around and grab things and twist them around. Then we realized we can do many more fun things.” I’ll bet.

Pretty darn cool, though if that Kinect dodgeball demo isn’t Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy come to life, I don’t know what is.

Horse taking it to the limit

August 17, 2012

New Mixel for iPhone promises “the easiest collage tool ever”

I was enthusiastic about the “social collage” tool Mixel when it launched last fall, and I was sad to hear last week of its impending demise. It didn’t stay down long, though, reappearing today as an iPhone app:

The previous incarnation emphasized more open-ended creativity, and in many users’ hands it often produced ugly results. This new version emphasizes more constraint & automation (“It does all the hard work of making your collages for you”), producing more attractive (if less flexible) results.

The notion of visual conversations has changed as well. It seems the team has moved away from the notion of remixing others’ artwork & is instead supporting replies (e.g. you share a collage, & I and others can add on our own–but we don’t start those by messing around with your creation). That’s probably a smart pivot, though some part of me still wants to think that when it comes to collaborative art-making, there’s a “there” there.

All in all it’s great to see Mixel continuing to evolve, and I like what I’ve been able to make so far.

Adobe Shadow (mobile device preview) demo today

See solutions to some of today’s most frustrating and time-consuming problems faced by mobile web developers and designers. In this 45 minute web conference led by Shadow team engineer Mark Rausch, you’ll see an in-depth demo of Adobe Shadow. Mark will show you how you can save time and improve your workflow. The demo will be followed by a Q&A session where you can give feedback and get your questions answered.

August 16, 2012

Demos: Using Adobe Ideas & Illustrator together

If you like to sketch out ideas while on the go & then refine them further, Adobe Ideas + Illustrator is a great one-two punch. Here’s a short series of quick demos that show the process & offer some best-practice guidance.

1. Starting a sketch in Adobe IdeasIn this video, we’ll go through a brief tour of the features of Adobe Ideas, before creating a sketch and prepping the workspace for our final illustration.

2. Creating a finished illustration in Adobe IdeasNext, we’ll take our sketch and turn it into a multi-layered colored illustration. We’ll also cover some techniques to facilitate a smooth transition into Illustrator, allowing for maximized editing ability.

3. Modifying an Ideas file in IllustratorFinally, we’ll use Creative Cloud to bring our Ideas file into Illustrator CS6. From there, we’ll learn some techniques on how to clean up and edit our artwork.

August 15, 2012

Coming soon to Illustrator: Package Files

Creative Cloud subscriptions carry a key advantage: Apps will get periodic feature enhancements (i.e. early access to functionality that would otherwise have had to wait until the next major product release). Here’s a peek at what’s coming soon to Illustrator subscribers:

I suppose someone will make a comment like “You are telling me that you are punishing customers who have purchased a license the way it has always worked.” No, actually: no one is getting punished. You now have a way to get early access to new features, but that’s up to you.

If you want to buy a license the traditional way, that’s perfectly fine, and you can wait until the next major version release (CS7) to get these & other improvements. If you subscribe, however, you get an additional advantage.

We should also differentiate these periodic feature enhancements (which are a subscriber benefit) from bug fixes & compatibility updates (which will go to all customers, same as always). We’ll work on being clearer on the latter (believe me, I share your frustration at the pace of info-sharing). The key point, though: nothing is being lost, and something cool is being gained.

Have I learned anything interesting along the way? Nothing too profound, I think: Love it, or don’t bother faking. Respect your readers’ time & attention, rewarding steady visits while omitting anything you wouldn’t want to read. Be loyal to them & they just might return the favor. Don’t try to be a kamikazesocial media hero over weekends & holidays, unless you absolutely must. Remember that your writing, even your comments, lives forever, and someday someone (let’s say a lawyer) might present you with an inch-thick printout (flattering!). Like I say, you’d better love it. But remember, too, how insanely lucky we are to have the time & tools to connect like this, and hopefully to illuminate one another’s lives just a bit.

August 14, 2012

Gotye remixing people remixing Gotye

If the sheer scale & diversity of artistic expression going on here—from beatboxing to shredding to whistling on plastic bottles; from body-painted video to homemade animation—doesn’t bring a smile to your lips, well, I probably can’t do much for you, my friend. :- [Previously: Five people playing a single guitar]

“Why Built-in Video Editing is Such a Big Deal for Photographers in Photoshop CS6″

August 12, 2012

The Olympics via TRON

The Chemical Brothers teamed up with Crystal CG to create this piece. It’s slow to start, but hang in there a bit. “Played in the Velodrome before every session,” the creators say, “the video shows the Velodrome as never before, literally pulsating with excitement. ‘We’ve created sweeping contours and sleek surfaces as the backdrop for an intense, futuristic cycling ‘duel’ as two animated riders power round the track,’ said Darren Groucutt, creative director at Crystal. ‘It truly brings the Velodrome to life.’”

August 11, 2012

“(Re)touching lives” in the wake of Japan’s tsunami

Self-proclaimed “pale, gray creature” (i.e. photo retoucher) Becci Mason spent three weeks helping in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. Soon after she turned to restoring photos lost & found in the wreckage. PetaPixel writes,

Within 2 weeks after putting out a call for help, she found herself with 150 volunteers willing to offer their time and services. Half a year later, the Photo Rescue volunteer count had ballooned to 1,100.

In the end, Mason’s efforts led to over 135,000 photographs being cleaned, and hundreds were retouched and returned to their owners.

August 10, 2012

Fascinating fluids photography… in space

To be a 57-year-old, highly regarded astronaut-scientist in orbit at this moment & yet to bring this level of boyish wonder to appreciating the natural world—well, I think Don Pettit must be doing something right.

August 09, 2012

Adobe & MIT team up on Halide, a new imaging language

Last month I broke the somewhat sad news that Adobe’s Pixel Bender language is being retired, but for a good cause: we can now redirect effort & try other ways to achieve similar goals. To that end, Adobe researchers have teamed up with staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to define Halide, a new programming language for imaging. It promises faster, more compact, and more portable code.

In tests, the MIT researchers used Halide to rewrite several common image-processing algorithms whose performance had already been optimized by seasoned programmers. The Halide versions were typically about one-third as long but offered significant performance gains — two-, three-, or even six-fold speedups. In one instance, the Halide program was actually longer than the original — but the speedup was 70-fold.

Adobe Muse demo/Q&A tomorrow

“Oh yeah, Muse–that looks cool; I keep meaning to learn more about it…” Well, Friday would be a good time to grab a sandwich & check it out; noon Pacific.

You’ll see how to quickly lay a smart foundation for your site using site maps and master pages, learn how to combine imagery, graphics, and beautiful typography using web fonts served by the Adobe Typekit service, and engage your audiences by adding interactive elements including custom navigation, slide shows and accordions. When you’re ready to take your site live, learn how to publish using a third-party hosting provider or with the Adobe Business Catalyst service, our flexible, all-in-one hosting solution.

Adobe Configurator 3.1 now live

Button Icons: In CS6 panels, you can associate your own images with a button object as icons for different states (button up, button down, and mouse over). You can have icons for Command, Script, Script file, Action, and Popup buttons.

Panels for Adobe Exchange: This release offers additional support and features that help you create panels for Adobe Exchange.

New attributes allow you to specify the Author and a Description for a panel that is exported as a CS Extension, and attribute names have been simplified from “Extension ID” and “Extension Version” to “ID” and “Version.”

MenuName and Author values are required; if they are empty or invalid, you cannot export the panel as a CS Extension.

The Create Certificate dialog has been simplified.

Scripting Support: The HTML widget now allows you to invoke predefined and developer-defined functions and scripts, which gives your panel access to the JavaScript API for Photoshop or InDesign.

Additional Color Theme Support: The HTML widget can now detect the user’s change of color themes in Photoshop CS6, so that you can provide light and dark versions of any panel content.

With Adobe Configurator 3.1 your panels can be more customized than ever before and you can distribute them as either free, paid, or private products via the new Adobe Exchange.

A 3D Olympics logo done in Photoshop

Even though Photoshop Extended is not (and is not promoted as being) a 3D modeling app, Corey Barker of NAPP decided to see how close he could get to NBC’s animated Olympics logo. (Non time-delayed spoiler: Pretty close!)

August 07, 2012

Thursday in SF: “Lightroom 4 to CS6 Workflow”

The San Francisco Photoshop Users Group will be meeting at Adobe SF Thursday evening starting at 6:30:

With the advent of Lightroom 4 a new Develop Module has been introduced with completely renamed sliders. Fine art photographer William Palank hopes to clarify some of these changes and propose a workflow completely different than in Lightroom 3 or its predecessors, bringing forth even more control with Shadows and Highlights on a single image.

The Olympics, rendered Lego by Lego

Brilliant: the Guardian’s Brick-by-Brick feature uses uses Legos + real audio from the games to re-enact the triumphs of Usain Bolt, the agonies of a South Korean fencer (sporting a stormtrooper helmet), and more. And how about Phelps putting away those turkey legs? [Via A. Jeremy P. Lawrence]

New Instagram actions for Photoshop

After the success of my Lightroom Instagram Presets, which led to multiple requests for Photoshop actions, they’re finally here! All 17 of Instagram’s filters are available to simulate the Instagram filters. They’re easily applied and just $5, the price of a latte or an app on your phone. Any money that I make from these sales will fund my travels to photograph beautiful places around the world.

August 06, 2012

A new chance to join Photoshop Engineering

I’m not kidding when I tell you these things come along rarely. People really like staying on the Photoshop team, and one “new guy” just moved on after seven years. If you’re a smart, seasoned computer engineer who loves crafting tools & productizing cutting-edge research, we’d love to talk with you. Please read on for details.

New painting presets & video for CS6

Digital painting pioneer John Derry makes & sells excellent Artists’ Brushes & Dry Media brushes for Photoshop, and you already can get some of them for free: go to the Tool Presets panel in Photoshop CS6 and load up “Airbrushes” and “Mixer Brush Pencil.” (There, I just doubled the number of people who know about these hidden gems!)

Robo-cams at the Olympics

Here’s a neat peek inside the AP’s ongoing hunt for new, fresh perspectives. I’m kind of charmed by the (now obsolete) approach of having some farmer-tanned dude jump into the pool to retrieve memory cards. Check out Wired for more details.

August 03, 2012

Introducing Source Sans Pro, Adobe’s first open-source type family

These days Adobe is releasing more open-source applications (e.g. the new WebKit-based code editor, Brackets). The Adobe type team felt they–and the community at large–needed a better option for on-screen work.

Thus they’ve created Source Sans Pro. As the Verge notes, “[T]his family of fonts is intended primarily to be used in user interfaces, meaning it has to be legible at low resolution yet also readable enough to support long streams of text.” Designer Paul D. Hunt explained some of his process & considerations for the project, adding:

Besides being ready for download to install on personal computers, the Source Sans fonts are also available for use on the web via font hosting services including Typekit, WebInk, and Google Web Fonts. Finally, the Source Sans family will shortly be available for use directly in Google documents and Google presentations.

“Oh yes!” said Russell–and thank goodness it did: if it hadn’t, Russell (and hundreds of others) wouldn’t have gotten laid off, and he wouldn’t have gone to Apple (where he met his future wife) and from there gone to “this little startup called ‘Adobe.'”

If that hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t have snatched my neck off the chopping block in ’02: I was days from being laid off post-LiveMotion, and it’s because Russell saw my “farewell” demo at his ADIM conference that he called the execs to say, “Really–we’re canning this guy…?” And, of course, had that not happened, I likely wouldn’t have met Cabel, wouldn’t have been introducing him & Russell, wouldn’t be talking to you now.

Of course, we joked, if it weren’t for the three of us talking just then, we’d be off experiencing some wonderful life-changing strokes of serendipity right now–but so it goes. :-)

August 01, 2012

It’s a small (design) world, after all

Not long after I started this blog, a student design portfolio started making the rounds & generating lots of buzz. Dave Werner had skillfully combined illustration, music, and photography with video (still a novel feat as this was pre-YouTube) to do some solid storytelling. The site generated all kinds of responses (“Brilliant!” “It’s just Flashturbation!”), but I was very impressed.

Six and a half years passed & I never met Dave, but right before the Fourth of July he dropped me a line to say he was looking for a new gig (something more stable than perpetual startup-land). I was glad to hear of his interest, but offhand I didn’t know of any good fits. Two days later–and equally out of the blue–a team at Adobe reached out & told me about a really cool project they’re starting that needed design talent.

Long story short, Dave just accepted Adobe’s offer & will be starting shortly. Let’s hear it for serendipity! We can’t wait to get started working together.